As my father was in the process of selling his business, I would make fairly regular trips back home and we would have conversations about the ups and downs of his life as a person who always had lots of interests going at the same time. He was a pilot and an airplane mechanic and a farm machinery dealer who sold a few vehicles and formed a rental and leasing company for heavy equipment. He ran trucks and transported good for others and held a thousand other interests. One of the things that he shared with me was that one of the hardest parts of his life in business was dealing with employees. It wasn’t the people. He liked the people who worked for him over the years. He admired their skills. But he could never figure out the right balance when it came to the details of being an employer: vacation and days off, breaks and scheduling, motivating workers and dealing with the complexities of their personal lives, supporting their independent interests and sometimes even helping them launch their own businesses. He was a hard worker who put in way more hours than any of his employees. Most days he was hard at work when they arrived and still working when they headed for home. He didn’t understand how someone would not want to put in the extra hours.

Coffee breaks drove him up the wall. For several years he experimented with a plan that gave extra vacation days to employees who voluntarily worked through the assigned breaks. He never smoked and he couldn’t undersand an employee who took a break to smoke a cigarette. From his point of view, why wouldn’t they want to just work straight through until the job was completed. The satisfaction of a completed job was very high in his motivation and he couldn’t figure out why that wasn’t the same for all of the people who worked for him.

At the time, I could understand some of his frustration with his employees, but I also had worked for him and knew how he could be a bit of a frustrating boss. He seemed to always expect us to know how to do a job and if we didn’t know to figure out on our own what to do. If you asked him how to do a particular job he was as likely to just do it himself as to really teach you how to do it. He was always thinking about the next job and the next challenge and rarely paused to celebrate accomplishments. It always felt a little bit like we couldn’t quite produce up to his expectations.

I do, however, have more empathy and understanding of him now that I have reached this phase of my life. Last night at a meeting we were discussing the process of searching for a new choir director for our church. For many different reasons, I’ve been through a lot of searches for new choir directors in my journey with this congregation. We have had some very good choirs and some very good choir directors. And we have had some fairly high levels of conflict up in our choir loft. We have had choir directors who have been overcome with frustration and others who have handled the tensions quite well. But choir directors, whether they have come to us from within our congregation or from outside of our congregation, have tended to show enthusiasm and energy for the job for a while and then fade. The turnover has been higher than I expected.

Our current vacancy is due to a tragic illness that resulted in the early death of our choir director. We all have been struggling with grief and perhaps have had less enthusiasm for the search than might have been the case had things turned out differently.

The bottom line is that we are getting ready to begin a new program year for the choir without the leadership in place that we had hoped to have. We will have a choir and our choir will contribute greatly to worship this fall, but it probably won’t be the way that we’ve done it before and it probably will take a comparatively large amount of my time to nurture the process. I will be working with interim and temporary leadership as we continue the search for permanent leadership. And we may need to redefine both the job and our sense of the meaning of “permanent” in order to find the employee that our church needs.

I know that it is all just part of the job. I know that all churches struggle with music leadership. But there are days when I wish it wasn’t my job to find the employees and keep them happy in their jobs. Of course, on paper it isn’t my job. But in reality there are things that need to happen and I’m the “buck stops here” person in our system.

I appreciate very much my father’s struggles to find and keep good employees.

Theologically, however, this isn’t just another job. It is a vocation - a calling. When I stop to think I know that in every generation God has provided the leadership for the future of our people. When Abraham and Sarah were old and it didn’t seem like they had any chance of producing an heir, things changed rather dramatically. By the time the story gets to Abraham’s great-grandson Jacob the family is so large and the family dynamics are so complex that it is hard to remember when we were worried whether or not there would be a next generation. I know that God will provide what we need to move forward as a congregation. I know that I have to trust the process and allow the timing to be what it becomes.

The bottom line is that I am extremely fortunate to serve in a congregation with such excellent music. The depth of talent in our congregation is amazing. The quality of the music that comes from our people and instruments is outstanding. There are lots of pastors who wish they had a fraction of the talent we enjoy.

The music will go on. We will have a choir. And we will continue to worship God in new and exciting ways.

And doing that will require a little more patience than I expected - and occasionally a little more than I think I have. God will supply that, too.

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